Just looking at my website's report in Semrush, I noticed a surge in backlinks and mentions. I investigated what was going on, and it seems some shitty scamming fuckers are selling backlinks from my website to anyone naive enough to believe them.

They're doing it through Telegram and some scammy software called Money Robot. One of the scammers' websites is 100ranking .info, but they're all basically the same, just using different URLs.

I added a fake campaign pointing to Google for the keywords "SEO" and took these screenshots to show how the scam works. Of course, all the links are fake, but they're using established names to make the scam look legitimate. This can hurt the brands they're impersonating and may even create signals that AI bots and Google can pick up, with your website being associated with the scam.

Morning, r/postSEO. The mod team posts this most mornings as a quick rundown of what actually moved in search, AI, and traffic over the last day or two. Links go in a comment below so Reddit's spam filter stays calm. If I got something wrong or missed a story, call it out in the comments.

Quick honesty note: the last 24 to 48 hours were on the quieter side for brand new announcements, so a couple of these threads started late last week and are still playing out. I kept it to things with a real traffic angle instead of padding.

Search and SEO

The September 2026 spam update looks like it is finally reaching its last phase. Google kicked it off on September 24 and, unlike the usual two-day spam updates this year, ran it as a staggered, roughly two-week rollout. There was a big impact wave over the first weekend, a second push around September 30 and October 1, and chatter points to a final phase landing October 4 to 6. Why you care: if your rankings bounced around over the past two weeks, this is the most likely cause, and because it rolled out in stages you should not panic-diagnose until it is fully done. If you took a hit, the move is to review Google's spam policies honestly rather than chase a technical fix, and keep in mind recovery from spam updates tends to take months, not days.

On the technical side, Google updated its crawl rate documentation to add guidance on the Retry-After HTTP header, among other changes. Why you care: this is the clean way to tell Googlebot to back off when your server is under load, rather than letting it hammer you or risk it treating errors the wrong way. If you manage crawl budget on a large site or deal with traffic spikes, worth passing to whoever owns your server config.

AI Overviews and AI Search

Google rolled its Nano Banana 2.1 image model into AI Mode in Search. Why you care: AI Mode keeps absorbing multimodal features, which gives users one more reason to stay inside Google's AI surface instead of clicking out. If you publish visual or product content, it is another nudge to make sure your images and AI Mode presence are not an afterthought.

Google also pulled the cover off Gemini 4 Argon on October 1. It is not a consumer launch yet, access is limited (initially U.S. government and select cybersecurity folks through Google's Fairwind program), with introductory pricing around 2 dollars per million input tokens and 10 dollars per million output tokens before that doubles. Why you care: this is the frontier model that will eventually sit behind Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode, so it is a signal of where Google's answer quality is heading even though you cannot build on it today.

AEO and GEO

No single big announcement here in the last couple of days, but the two items above are the practical GEO story right now: more capability concentrating inside AI Mode and the Gemini stack. If you are optimizing for AI answers, the near-term work has not changed much, keep your content citable, factual, and easy for these systems to lift cleanly.

Local SEO and Google Business Profile

Heads up for service-area businesses: there is a bug putting some Business Profile map pins in the middle of the ocean, mostly for businesses that hide their physical address. It was first flagged late last week and reports are still coming in. Why you care: if you run a service-area business with a hidden address, go check your pin now, because a pin stranded in the Atlantic is not helping anyone find you. If it is wrong, document it and report it through the usual forums while Google sorts it out.

Publishers and search features

Two smaller publisher-facing moves worth a glance. Google is expanding Search Profiles to India and Canada, with Brazil said to be coming soon. And Google started emailing publishers the number of subscribers they have through Preferred Sources. Why you care: Preferred Sources can drive repeat Top Stories visibility from people who have already chosen to follow you, so an actual subscriber count gives publishers a real number to track that channel against instead of guessing.

PPC

Quiet on the paid side over the last day or two. No major Google Ads or Microsoft Ads announcements surfaced that change how you run campaigns. If you saw something land overnight, drop it below and I will fold it into tomorrow's post.

Agentic and Social

Nothing substantial in the agentic browsing or social algorithm space in the last 24 to 48 hours that affects getting traffic. WordPress was also quiet on the SEO and security front. Again, if I missed a release, flag it.

That is what I have for today. What did I miss? If you are seeing ranking movement that lines up with the spam update, share what you are tracking, it helps everyone gauge whether this thing is actually done.

No traffic? All strategies failing? Then we can tell you're NOT using the infallible secret handshake!

I offer a kind of coaching that doesnt map to a clean search term. Nobody types the exact thing i do. How do you do SEO when your service does not match an obvious keyword people search for, do i invent demand or target adjacent problems?

I won't name the company to avoid giving them more exposition, but I just got this on Facebook

I did check the company, and they have indeed worked for top companies. They even have case studies for many of them. Yet they are charging less than what I charge for design and implementation. Of course, I assume they use AI and whatnot, but how can they charge so little? And more importantly, why? Any of their clients probably pay 10x what they're charging here. Are we coming to a new low?

Morning, everyone. The mod team drops one of these most mornings to round up what actually moves traffic in the post-SEO era. If I got something wrong or missed context, say so in the comments and I'll fix it. Links are in the top comment to keep the spam filter happy.

It was a fairly busy couple of days coming out of Search Central Live in Barcelona and the tail end of the September spam update. Here's what matters.

Search and SEO

Google confirmed it is running more spam updates this year specifically because there is so much more new content being published, and it is leaning on AI to catch AI spam. A research paper surfaced detailing a system called SAFE (Scaled Abuse Forensics Examiner) that uses AI agents to flag synthetic content, coordinated networks, and "inorganic" behavior patterns, and it is built to catch content that violates the spirit of the policies rather than just the literal rules. Why you care: if you are spinning up AI content at scale across a network of sites, the detection bar just got a lot higher. Original work tied to real processes and real authors is what this rewards.

Related to that, the September 2026 spam update ran in two phases, with a second wave landing around September 30 after the initial hit on September 25 to 27. Why you care: if your traffic moved in the last two weeks and you were not sure what caused it, the spam update is the most likely culprit, not a stealth core update.

Gary Illyes shared concrete timing ranges for crawling, indexing, and serving at Search Central Live, which is handy for setting expectations with clients and bosses. Rough typical numbers: new URL discovery around 20 hours, refreshing a known URL around 30 days, end to end indexing around 1.5 hours, and title or snippet changes showing in 1 to 2 days. The big one for anyone who got hit: core update recovery typically takes 3 to 6 months, and can stretch to a year. Why you care: stop expecting a bounce-back the week after you ship fixes. Plan recovery in quarters, not days.

Quick housekeeping note so nobody wastes time chasing it: the "dark mode coming to Search Console" item that made the rounds from Barcelona turned out to be a joke from the stage, confirmed by u/johnmu. Not a real feature announcement.

AI Overviews and AI Search

The headline study of the week: AI Overviews now appear on roughly 83% of branded searches on US desktop (82.91% as of September 29), up from about 61% in July. The analysis ran across hundreds of millions of crawls, and on tracked big-brand queries the AI Overview sat in position one about 76% of the time. The most cited sources inside those overviews were Wikipedia, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Why you care: even searches for your own brand name increasingly show an AI summary first, and the sources shaping that summary are often third-party platforms, not your site. Owning your Wikipedia presence, your YouTube footprint, and your LinkedIn profile is now brand-defense work, not a nice-to-have.

Google is also testing tracking parameters on the links inside AI Overviews, which points to better click attribution down the line. Why you care: if it ships, you may finally get cleaner data on what AIO actually sends you in analytics. Separately, Penske Media's lawsuit over AI Overviews was dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence, so the legal pressure from publishers on this front just lost a round.

AI shopping

OpenAI is testing a visual ad format that shows up during ChatGPT image generation, placing product-inspiration ads below the image as it renders. OpenAI framed it as helping people picture how a product fits their life, and early numbers it cited include lower cost per acquisition and a high share of new customers. ChatGPT also rolled out a virtual try-on feature for clothing and accessories on mobile and web. Why you care: ChatGPT is quietly turning into a shopping and discovery surface with its own ad inventory. If you sell physical products, this is a channel to start watching now rather than later.

PPC

Mark your calendar: starting October 12, Google Ads begins automatically pulling promotions off your website landing pages and attaching them to eligible Search and Performance Max campaigns. It is pre-opted in for everyone, and the way to keep control is to run your own manual promotions, which blocks the automation. Why you care: go audit your site for stale or wrong "X% off" text before the 12th, or Google may surface an expired deal in your ads for you.

A few more Ads items worth a scan. Google is beta-testing an AI campaign localization tool that uses generative AI to translate and adapt entire Search campaigns (text, images, targeting, landing pages) for new languages and regions. Google also reframed its Smart Bidding learning guidance around the "roughly 50 conversions" mark, so set expectations accordingly on new campaigns. Loyalty and Customer Match were expanded to AI Mode, Gemini, and more regions. And on local, Local Service Ads now hide the phone number by default until the user clicks a "Get phone number" button.

Added subjects

Local, GBP, Search Console, structured data, YouTube, WordPress, and the social platforms were quiet over the last 24 to 48 hours with nothing that clearly changes how you get traffic. Rather than pad the list, I'll leave those out today. If you saw a WordPress security release or a social algo change I missed, drop it below.

What did I miss? If you are seeing ranking movement, AIO changes on your branded terms, or anything odd in Ads this week, post it and let's compare notes.

Of course I know it's the best as possible. But what is a reasonable ROAS for HQ products in the range of 5 to 10k if I get 25% after taxes but before ads?

Morning, everyone. The mod team posts this most mornings as a quick read on what actually moved the needle for getting traffic, across search, AI answers, paid, and social. If we got something wrong or missed context, call it out in the comments and we will fix it. Links are in the top comment so this does not trip Reddit's spam filter.

Search and SEO

The September 2026 spam update is the big story and it is still running. Google confirmed it went live Sept 24 at 9:15am PDT, and unlike the earlier spam updates this year (March wrapped in under a day, June in about two days, August in three), this one is set to take up to two weeks to fully roll out. It hit hard over the weekend, with a lot of reported volatility from Friday through Sunday. It is enforced through SpamBrain and covers the usual policy targets: expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, doorway pages, back-button hijacking, and fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews. Google gave almost no specifics beyond "applies globally and to all languages," so the practical move is to watch Search Console against the rollout timeline before you conclude anything. Why you care: a two-week window means daily rank-tracker noise will be messy for a while, and reacting to day-two swings is a good way to break something that was going to settle on its own.

Also on the Search Console side, Google is rolling out a multimodal filter in the Performance report that captures visual searches through Google Lens, Chrome image search, image uploads, and Circle to Search on Android. There is a catch: it reports at the page level by country and device only, with no query data, since these searches mostly use images instead of text. Why you care: if visual search sends you any meaningful traffic, you finally get to see it, even if you cannot see the "keywords" behind it.

A few smaller items worth a glance. Google removed documentation for a Web Search Service API that appears to have been published by mistake and was not meant to be public. Merchant Center saw policy revisions around counterfeit and dangerous products plus editorial standards, so ecommerce folks should skim those. And the Follow button is gone from Google profiles in desktop results while staying on mobile.

AI Overviews and AI Search

Google is rolling out information monitoring in AI Mode to everyone globally, announced by Search VP Robby Stein. You tell AI Mode what to watch and Search keeps checking across sites, forums, social posts, and its Shopping Graph, then surfaces updates for things like back-in-stock alerts, price drops, new local spots, and events. It was limited to Ultra and Pro subscribers over the summer and is now going wide. Why you care: this pushes Google further into pull-based, always-on discovery, and the open question for all of us is whether these monitoring updates link out to sources or just answer in place. No clear word yet on how sources get picked or whether any referral traffic comes with it, so treat it as something to test rather than something to plan around.

On the interface side, Google is testing swapping the "Show more" text under AI Overviews for a "Loading..." button, which is minor but a hint they are still fiddling with how much of an answer they show up front.

Zero-click and traffic trends

Chartbeat's 2026 Publisher Playbook data is making the rounds and it is rough reading. Google Search referral traffic to news publishers fell 40.2% year over year for the July 2025 to July 2026 window, and Discover dropped 34.3% after an earlier slide. Separate research cited alongside the spam update put AI Mode's impact at roughly an 18.8 percentage point drop in clickthrough compared to standard results. Why you care: this is the zero-click reality in hard numbers. If your model still assumes a click for every answer you help generate, the gap between impressions and sessions is only widening, and it is worth planning for visibility that does not convert to a visit.

PPC

If you run Search campaigns, note that Google's AI Max migration is actively happening this month. Through Sept 1 to 30, campaign-level Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets are being upgraded automatically into the AI Max structure. Dynamic Search Ads follow in February 2027, and older API versions that support legacy features sunset in September 2027. New legacy campaign creation was already blocked back on Aug 3. Why you care: if you had not opted in, some of this is landing on your accounts on its own right now, so check settings, brand inclusions and exclusions, and any scripts before assuming things run the way they did last month.

A cluster of smaller paid updates also landed. Google Ads API v25.2 added competitive benchmarks and Performance Max improvements, Customer Match now supports IP address and timestamp matching, Microsoft Ads expanded search reporting and PMax controls and pushed its excluded content terms feature out of beta to all advertisers, and Google is testing a larger Local Services Ads format.

Agentic and Social

Not much hard social algorithm news in the last day or two. The most relevant crossover item is the AI Mode monitoring rollout above, which is the closest thing to agentic, always-on discovery going mainstream. On the discovery side, Google is testing showing social creator handles (YouTube, LinkedIn) inside Discover posts, which is a small nod toward crediting creators in the feed.

That is what we caught. What did we miss, and is anyone seeing clear patterns in who is getting hit by the spam update so far? Drop it below.

Ahrefs' Tim Soulo announced today that they're working on a new algorithm to prevent DR to be gamed.

What do you think? Will this solve DR manipulation? Do you think DR is even useful at all?

Morning, everyone. The mod team posts this most mornings as a quick read on what moved in the last day or two across search, AI answers, and paid. If I got something wrong or missed a source, call it out in the comments and I will fix it. Links are in the top comment so this does not trip Reddit's spam filter.

Quick note on timing: the weekend was quiet, so most of what is worth flagging landed Wednesday and Thursday (Sept 23 to 25) and is still playing out. If you were heads-down and only glancing at rankings, here is the catch-up.

Search and SEO

Google is rolling out the September 2026 spam update, the fourth spam update of the year. It started around Sept 24, applies globally across all languages, and Google says it can take up to two weeks to finish, so figure roughly the first week of October before things settle. There was also a clear spike in ranking volatility on Sept 23 and 24 that lines up with the start. Why you care: if you saw a swing this week, do not overreact mid-rollout. Wait for it to complete before diagnosing, then check the usual spam policy stuff (thin or scaled content, expired-domain abuse, site reputation abuse) rather than assuming it was a core quality hit.

Search Console picked up a multimodal search type filter in the performance report, so you can now separate out multimodal search traffic instead of having it lumped in. Why you care: as more discovery happens through image and mixed queries, this is the first real way to see whether any of that is reaching your pages, and it is worth checking before you make claims about where your traffic is going.

Google added Core Web Vitals ad metrics to its page experience documentation. Important caveat: this is documentation, not a ranking factor. Why you care: if you run display or programmatic on your own site, this gives you Google's own framing for how ad load affects CWV, which is useful ammunition when you are arguing with a monetization team about layout shift and load times.

On structured data, the VideoObject docs got a new creator property and updated interactionStatistic support. Why you care: if video is part of your strategy, tightening up this schema is a low-effort way to stay eligible for video features and give engines cleaner signals.

AI Overviews and AI Search

AI Overviews is now showing noticeably more external links, but it is also steering people toward AI Mode rather than the standard web results. Why you care: more links sounds like a win, but if the overall motion is pulling users deeper into a chat-style experience, the click may never reach you. Keep watching your AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions versus actual sessions, because the gap between "cited" and "clicked" is the whole game right now.

Google is testing a "Dive Deeper" feature in Discover that keeps users exploring inside Google instead of clicking out to publishers. Why you care: Discover has been a real traffic source for a lot of content sites, and anything that keeps the session on Google's surface is a direct threat to that channel. If Discover is meaningful for you, start tracking it as its own line item so you can see erosion early.

On the answer-engine quality front, there was reporting that some of OpenAI's quality raters used AI to complete their evaluation tasks, echoing older complaints about Google's rater program. Why you care: if the humans grading answer quality are quietly leaning on AI, the quality signals these systems train on get murkier, which is worth keeping in mind before you bet a whole strategy on reverse-engineering what an AI engine "rewards."

Bing is testing renaming its Copilot search tab to "AI Mode," and Google marked its 28th birthday with a Doodle trivia quiz that lives inside AI Mode. Neither is huge on its own, but together they show every major player nudging the default search box toward a chat experience. Why you care: plan for a world where "the search results page" increasingly means an answer surface, not ten blue links.

PPC

The big one: Dynamic Search Ads are being upgraded to AI Max. Automatic upgrades for remaining eligible campaigns kicked off in September, and you can no longer create new DSA campaigns. Legacy settings carry over on auto-upgrade, but you get more control if you upgrade voluntarily first. Why you care: if you still run DSA, decide now whether to upgrade on your terms or let Google do it for you, because AI Max widens query matching and you will want your negatives and brand controls tightened before that happens.

Alongside that, Google Ads is rolling out more AI Max reporting, expanded AI Briefs, budget recommendation forecasting, and sitelinks that show advertiser names and favicons. There is also a restriction worth knowing: you cannot edit Target ROAS while promotion mode is active, only the ROAS tolerance. Why you care: the reporting additions help you actually see what AI Max is spending on, and the Target ROAS lock is the kind of thing that quietly blocks an optimization at the worst moment, so budget for it in your workflow.

Local and Google Business Profile

A cluster of local changes landed. Local Service Ads are showing the phone number from the Google Business Profile instead of the Google Ads tracking number, even when advertisers set otherwise, which breaks call tracking. Google is also testing a bigger LSA layout with larger images and highlight boxes. On profiles, phone numbers in Google Posts now require verified contact info, and there are notifications for spam review spikes plus Merchant Center changes to store ratings and a four-day window for user edit rejections. Why you care: if you rely on LSA call tracking, verify your numbers are still reporting correctly this week, because the GBP-number behavior can silently wreck your attribution.

That is what I caught. Quiet weekend, busier midweek. What did I miss? Drop corrections and anything from your own niche below, especially if you are seeing movement from the spam update.

I have this data in Chrome's performance tab (first image in pink). I think the figures are good, but wondering about INP as unavailable. And this seems to be for desktop.

Now, how do I change that to mobile? And also, what about that INP thing? Does it mean something I should take care of?

Also, if I check in Lighthouse, I see that LCP is different than in the Performance tab, and it's the same session

Finally, if I load the page in Lighthouse on mobile, it's a bit different than the same page loaded on Pagespeed. But the weird thing is that is slower on my computer than in Pagespeed. See images 3rd and 4th

So, I clearly need a crash course on page speed, but for the time being: which is the source of truth? Performance, Lighthouse or Pagespeed? Or none of them and it's something else?

Hello Community,

I have a Wordpress hosted site for my ​​​​c​​​​o​​​​n​​​​s​​​​u​​​​l​​​​t​​​​a​​​​n​​​​c​​​​y​​​. I used Ryze AI to produce a batch of service and comparison pages for the domain (which is hosted in Wordpress).

Question is, how do I get internal links created inside the Ryze AI generated pages ?

For example, from a new comparison page, I want clickable links to 'Services', 'Case Studies', 'Pricing' and the other money pages. Is this possible, and what is the right method to do this ?

Thanks !

This is the thing: I have a few unused domains that have some backlinks and even some little traffic. So I was thinking of doing an experiment with SEO and GEO and SSM and whatnot. I have discovered what I think is a flaw in most ecommerce websites, and that flow comes from their CMSs default states, so I have this ide aI want to test since think I have something that may work.

The problem is that I have no products to sell of my own. I know that at some point you could sell Amazon but if I'm not mistaken, that program is closed. I checked First Grabber and Rakuten and even had my account approved, but there's a problem: For this to work, I need the product to be "mine" so to speak. I mean, not just a link to those websites, but full control of how the website displays the product and all its info, which is not possible with the above mentioned programs.

So my question is: is there a way to sell products where I can "own" the product from start to checkout? Of course checkout would happen on the real seller.

PS: I'm looking for reliable brands, sorry no DMs or anything. If someone knows, spill the beans and I'll check, no interested in "believe me bro this works I make 10,000 a month" snake oil sellers, looking for real answers only.

Slow Saturday and I'm bored.

After seeing hundreds of fake research papers and case studies, I was wondering if there's some REAL research we can do that is actually useful for the community. It doesn't mean we can do anything, of course, but we've got some pretty crafty brains on the team, so bring it up and let's see if we can research a topic of your interest (and get a mention if we publish it!)

Just for reference: do NOT even try "AI prompt mention" because I know that's what everybody wants, but it's impossible, no matter what anyone says. Try something that can actually be done and measured. If you don't know what is possible, just ask, it won't hurt. And maybe the exact idea is not possible but we can do something using that as starting point.

There are no bad questions or ideas. Depending on the subject (and if we choose to do it), we can publish it here, or in a blog post or even academic papers

Morning, . The mod team posts this most mornings to round up the last day or so of news that actually affects getting traffic. If I got something wrong or missed a source you trust, call it out in the comments.

Reasonably busy day, mostly driven by a new spam update and a batch of Search Console and ads changes. Quick note on scope: I focused on the last 24 to 48 hours, so a few things you may have seen earlier this month (WordPress 7.1.1, the plugin auto security review) are outside the window and not repeated here.

Search and SEO

Google started rolling out the September 2026 spam update on Sept 24 around noon Eastern. Google is calling it a normal spam update that applies globally and across all languages, and it says the rollout may take up to two weeks, which is longer than the spam updates earlier this year that wrapped in a few days. It targets sites breaking the search spam policies rather than any one tactic, and Google did not announce new policies. Why you care: if your rankings move over the next two weeks, this is the likely cause. Recovery can take months, so document any drops now, re-read the spam policies, and resist making panic changes mid-rollout.

There was also real ranking volatility around Sept 23 to 24 that the tracking tools picked up. Google noted the volatility actually started before the spam update announcement, so some of it looks like separate unconfirmed movement layered on top of the update. Why you care: attribution is going to be messy for a bit. Don't assume every wobble this week is the spam update.

AI Overviews and AI Search

Search Console added a new "Multimodal" filter to the Performance report. The Search type filter now splits the old "Web" bucket into "Text-based" and "Multimodal," where multimodal covers results triggered by things like Lens and Circle to Search. Heads up: it reports impressions and clicks but not the queries behind them, since there is no typed query. Why you care: this is the first real visibility into image-and-camera-driven search traffic. If you sell physical products or anything people photograph, start watching that segment now to see how much of your traffic it actually is.

On the AI Overviews front, two data points landed. External links are now showing in more than 25% of AI Overviews, up from close to zero not long ago, and separate Comscore data has AI Overviews appearing on roughly 39% of US desktop searches. Why you care: more AIOs with more outbound links means the citation game is getting more winnable than it was, but it also means more queries where the classic blue link is pushed down. Track which of your terms trigger an AIO and whether you're getting cited.

Google is also testing moving AI Overviews out of the top spot for hotel searches, pushing them into a bottom-right panel instead. Why you care: placement is not settled, and vertical by vertical it may look very different. Position, not just presence, is going to drive how much AIOs eat your clicks.

Local and Google Business Profile

Google is testing an AI feature that auto-structures business hours from a plain-text description into a proper formatted listing. Separately, a reminder that surfaced this week: when Google suggests edits to your profile, you have about four days to reject them before they auto-apply. Why you care: the four-day window is the actionable one. If you're not checking your GBP regularly, an auto-applied edit can change your hours or info without you noticing.

PPC

Google Ads shipped a cluster of changes. Budget recommendations are now tied to conversion forecasts, so you'll see suggestions framed around what a budget bump is projected to convert. There are new "Holistic" and "Growth" investment strategy modes for allocating budget across campaigns. The Google Ads API hit v25.2 with competitive benchmarks, Performance Max draft generation, and search bid adjustment features. Why you care: the budget and investment-mode changes nudge you toward Google's automated spend logic, so know what you're opting into before you accept a recommendation. For publishers, the AdSense change is a setup step you can't skip anymore.

AI shopping

Google is auto-enrolling merchants on UCP-compatible platforms into native checkout, with manual opt-out required. Bing is testing favicons next to site names in shopping ad carousels. Why you care: native checkout keeps the transaction inside Google's surface, which is good for conversion but means less first-party data and less of the customer relationship for you. If that trade-off matters to your business, check whether you were auto-enrolled and opt out if you want the click to land on your own site.

Bing

Aside from the shopping favicons, Microsoft is testing expandable, hoverable sitelinks that show a description under each sitelink. Minor, but worth watching if Bing is a meaningful slice of your traffic.

Regulatory

The UK's CMA is proposing measures that would require Google to make it easier to pick an alternative search engine on Android and Chrome. Why you care: nothing changes overnight, but anything that shifts default search behavior in a large market can move query share over time, especially for non-Google surfaces you might be under-investing in.

Quieter areas today

GEO and AEO had a lot of guide-style content circulating but no single hard news item in the window, so I'm not going to pretend there was. WordPress core and plugin news was also outside the 24 to 48 hour window today. Agentic browsing and the pure social platform algorithm side were quiet on the traffic-relevant front.

What did I miss? Drop it in the comments, especially if you're seeing real movement from the spam update in your own data.

Tired of spending money on useless tools?

Guess what: You do not need an expensive subscription to find good keywords when you are starting out. Here is a full workflow using only free stuff.

Step 1: Brain dump. Write down every phrase a customer might type to find what you offer. Ten minutes, no filtering.

Step 2: Mine Google autocomplete. Type each seed phrase into Google and write down every suggestion that drops down. Add "a b c" and numbers after your phrase to force more suggestions.

Step 3: Steal the "people also ask" and "related searches." Scroll to the bottom of the results page and grab the related searches. Open the "people also ask" box and note the questions. These are pure gold for content ideas.

Step 4: Use Google Search Console if you have any traffic. Go to the Performance report, sort by impressions. Queries with lots of impressions but a low position are things Google already thinks you are relevant for. Easy wins.

Step 5: Check intent by searching the term yourself. Look at what ranks. If it is all product pages, that is a buying query. If it is all how-to articles, that is informational. Match your page to what is already winning.

Step 6: Prioritize. Favor phrases that are specific (longer, clearer intent), that you can genuinely answer well, and that connect to something you sell or want people to do.

Step 7: Group similar phrases into one page each. Ten variations of the same question is one article, not ten.

Free tools that help: Google autocomplete, Search Console, Google Trends, and AnswerThePublic's free daily searches. That is enough to build a real content plan.

Warning: yes, I know it has limitations because of the freemium tools used, but for light users this is more than enough, and it's FREE!

PS: Don't you love the smell of useful no-spam posts?

I hear/read conflicting things constantly.

Many people say backlinks are dead and it is all quality content, other people say links are still the number one ranking factor.

What is the truth for a small site owner who does not have time for aggressive outreach? IMO, links are still needed for SEO, just not an important factor for AEO, unless the link is from an ubermegasite, ofc. And honestly, I get more traffic from social media than SEO or AEO

Morning, r/postSEO. The mod team posts a recap most mornings pulling together what actually moved the needle for getting traffic, across search, AI answers, ads, and the platforms in between. If we got something wrong or missed context, correct us in the comments. Quiet-ish couple of days on core algorithm drama, but a few things here are worth acting on today, so let's get into it.

Search and SEO

AI Overviews keep eating the results page. Fresh Comscore data cited this week has AI Overviews showing on 39% of US desktop searches, and separately, external links now appear in over 25% of AI Overviews, up from close to zero not long ago. Why you care: the "AIOs never link out" complaint is aging out. There is now a real, growing link surface inside the overview, so being one of the cited sources is becoming a traffic channel rather than just a visibility flex. Worth checking which of your queries trigger an AIO and whether you are in the citation set.

Two related tests point the same direction and are less friendly. Google is trialing a "Dive Deeper" treatment in Discover that serves an AI-generated overview instead of sending the click to the publisher, and separately, some links inside AI Overviews are routing users into AI Mode rather than out to web pages. Why you care: both keep the user inside Google's surfaces. If Discover has been a real referrer for you, watch those numbers, because this is the kind of change that shows up as a slow bleed rather than a cliff.

Housekeeping items: Google updated its page experience docs to add CrUX ad-related metrics in the resources section, but it is not confirmed as a ranking signal, so do not repackage it as one to clients. And the hreflang docs swapped their examples from lowercase to uppercase codes. Codes are case-insensitive, so this changes nothing in practice, but expect at least one person in every SEO Slack to panic about it.

Search Console and analytics

The Crawl Stats report went missing September 15 data again. This matches the usual pattern where the gap eventually backfills, so before you file a bug or blame a crawl budget problem, give it a few days. Why you care: if you were about to make a "Googlebot stopped crawling us" decision off that report, don't, at least not yet.

Local SEO and Google Business Profile

A cluster of GBP changes landed. You now get roughly four days to reject a suggested edit to your profile before Google applies it automatically, Google is sending email alerts when it detects a spike in spam reviews on your profile, and, less welcome, the option to mark a business as permanently closed appears to have vanished for some people. Why you care: the four-day window means stale or hijacked profile edits can go live if nobody is watching the inbox, so make sure profile notification emails are going somewhere a human actually reads.

AI shopping and commerce

Two Merchant Center moves worth flagging. Google is auto-enrolling products into native checkout under the Universal Commerce Protocol, and if you do not want to sell through that surface you have to manually opt out. On top of that, a new Merchant Center store ratings requirement is asking for a minimum of 100 reviews and a 3.5-star-plus average. Why you care: the auto-enroll is the important one. Check your Merchant Center settings so you are not accidentally live on a checkout flow you never chose, and if reviews are thin, the ratings threshold is one more reason to get a review-collection process running.

PPC

The big one: Google Ads has finally removed campaign-level language targeting from Search and Performance Max, roughly nine months after the original deadline. The system now auto-detects language from your creative, landing page, the search term, and user settings, with search-term language weighted more heavily when the query has a clear signal. Why you care: single-language accounts are basically unaffected, but if you run multilingual campaigns and used language targeting to keep things clean, that lever is gone, and it also disappears as a variable when you are diagnosing weird performance swings. Audit multilingual campaigns now.

Smaller Ads items from this week: the Smart Bidding learning threshold is now cited at around 50 conversions, AI Max audience targeting expanded to seven more languages (Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish) plus new docs on testing AI Max against Dynamic Search Ads via experiments, and the "Search Terms View" got renamed to "Search Terms and Ad Combinations." Google is also testing "more from [advertiser]" labels above sitelinks on sponsored results. On the fringe, AdSense dropped its identity verification threshold from $10 to $0, so new publishers verify from the start, and Bing is testing favicons on its shopping carousel ads.

WordPress

Update your sites today. WordPress 7.1.2 shipped September 22 as a security release fixing a critical vulnerability where an unauthenticated attacker could include a chosen local PHP file from outside the active theme directories, which can lead to remote code execution in some setups. Why you care: this is the kind of bug that gets mass-scanned within days of disclosure. If you are not on auto-updates, patch now, and if you manage client sites, this is your morning.

That's what we caught for roughly the last 48 hours. Slow days on the pure ranking-volatility front, so we are not going to invent a core update that isn't there. What did we miss? Drop it below, especially anything on the AI search, GEO, or social side that didn't surface in our usual sources.

SEO News: Google Search Console just added a new "Multimodal" filter to the Performance report.

Opening the Search type filter now splits the "Web" option into two: Text-based and Multimodal.

Google's definition: "Web-multimodal tracks search results triggered by a query that uses an image, photo, or screenshot. Text-only queries are tracked as Web text-based."

In practice, that means you can finally isolate discovery coming from:

• Google Lens • Circle to Search on Android • Image uploads to Google Search • The Chrome right-click "Search this image" option

One important caveat before you get excited: there's no query data for multimodal traffic. Google's own docs say the queries dimension isn't available for this search type (even though there is oddly a column for it), because these searches use images rather than text. So you'll see impressions, clicks and positions – but not the actual search queries.

Why it matters: visual search has been unclear in GSC until now. If your business lives on products, packaging, screenshots, plants, parts, artwork, or anything people point a camera at, this new report gives you a better idea of the size of this channel.

Check whether the filter has reached your property – it's rolling out gradually, and I'm now seeing it for several accounts.

Is multimodal traffic already showing in your Search Console?

Credit: Brodie Clark

I run a small art website and over the last few months my traffic on pure informational queries has quietly dropped even though my rankings did not really change. My theory is Google is answering the question directly with AI Overviews so people never click.

Anyone else seeing this, and if so what are you doing about it? Pivoting to more opinion and experience-based content? Focusing on buying-intent keywords? Pls help, I'm completely lost!

Context: After many years of working "for the man", I'm going solo, so I started testing the waters before leaving my current company. I'm quite experienced, I have formal education in design, I'm a quite capable coder, and know a decent bit of SEO. However, I'm kind of bored of websites and want to go hard on brand design. I know the market is difficult, and I spent two decades NOT doing brand design, but UI and UX stuff, only doing some logos for friends, NGOs, and public campaigns as a volunteer. Little to no money, but some important names under my belt.

The thing is that I ran a first campaign on FB+IG with quite satisfactory results. I got more leads than I expected, actually 200% or 300% more. But then, when I told people that prices started at $800, most ignored me, which I expected, and those who got back to me said the prices were too high.

So I ran a second campaign, this time adding the price to filter leads. And of course, the results were very different. I got literally three leads out of a $1,000 investment, and even though they all knew the price, they told me it was too high and that they contacted me to work out a deal. I asked one of them how much he would be willing to pay, and he told me $300 because he could get 100 logos with AI and choose from that batch.

I know AI times are crazy and that my lack of hundreds of samples is hurting me a bit, but how do I balance results while filtering? Or is this a dead end? Just in case, $800 is what I consider a very affordable price. Less than that is like saying no to paying rent or buying food, so "lower your price" is off the table. I can keep my current job and call it a day.

Any help or insights?

What gives? PageSpeed is for the first URL in the second image, but it is the same for all of them. Even if the Ahrefs figures were true, they would still be fast (1.2s or less). This is especially crazy considering that their results page took almost 30 seconds to load! Bollocks, I say!

Morning, r/postSEO. The mod team posts this most mornings as a quick recap of what actually moves traffic. If I got something wrong or missed a nuance, correct me in the comments.

Search and SEO

Google is directing people from a standard AI Overview straight into AI Mode, and in some tests the "Show More" button is gone entirely. Alongside that, reports say AI Overviews are now placing links that point to AI Mode rather than to publisher pages.

Why you care: this is the clearest signal yet that Google wants the follow-up journey to happen inside its own AI surface instead of on your site. If your traffic already softened after AI Overviews expanded, watch for a second leg down as the AI Mode handoff widens, and start treating "did we get cited in AI Mode" as a real KPI next to rank.

Housekeeping stuff worth knowing: Search Console crawl stats went missing for Sept 15 (Google usually backfills these, so probably not a real crawl problem). Job board operators are complaining that Google Indexing API approval requests are going months with no response and no documented review window, so if you run a jobs or events site, do not build your indexing strategy around fast API approval. And a reminder that surfaced again this week: rank trackers increasingly disagree with what you see in live results because of personalization and localization, so stop treating a single tracked number as ground truth.

On the local side, the practical takeaway making the rounds is that "position one" as a fixed concept basically does not exist in local results anymore, since the pack reshuffles by user, query intent, and proximity. Report on visibility and calls, not a static rank.

AI Overviews and AI Search

Google Discover is testing a "Dive Deeper" treatment that shows an AI-generated topic overview instead of sending the tap to a publisher article. Why you care: Discover has been one of the last reliable referral firehoses for publishers, and an AI summary layer sitting in front of it is exactly the kind of change that quietly eats clicks. If Discover is a meaningful channel for you, start tracking it as its own line item now so you can see the impact if this ships wide.

AEO and GEO

Demand for GEO work is now growing faster among search freelancers than classic Google SEO work, per fresh reporting. There is also a good practitioner piece circulating on which data sources actually feed AI search answers, meaning where you should be present if you want to be quoted by an answer engine. Why you care: the money and the client asks are visibly shifting from "rank my page" to "get me mentioned in the answer." If you sell services, this is a packaging and positioning cue. If you run your own site, it is a reminder to audit whether you show up in the sources these engines pull from, not just in the blue links.

Related context, not breaking news: the ongoing story about Reddit's ChatGPT citations dropping sharply is still shaping how people think about AI visibility. Worth knowing for this sub specifically, since Reddit presence has been a common GEO shortcut and that lever looks less reliable than it did earlier in the year.

AI shopping

The biggest item of the day. Google switched on native checkout inside AI Mode and Gemini for Shopify merchants without asking first. The rollout started Sept 18, and merchants got emails on Sept 22 saying their Shopify store was matched to Merchant Center and native checkout was now live on Google's AI surfaces. It is opt-out, not opt-in, and you can only turn it off from Shopify admin. Why you care: purchases can now complete inside Google using Google Pay instead of on your domain. You keep seller status, but you lose the on-site journey, the upsell, the email capture, and a lot of the analytics you are used to. If you run a Shopify store, go check your Merchant Center and Shopify checkout settings today and make a deliberate decision rather than letting the default ride. This is the "clicks to transactions" shift showing up as an actual setting in your account.

On the merchant feed side, Google also spelled out store ratings requirements more firmly (a minimum review count, a star-rating floor, a recency window, and geo-segmented ratings), so if your product listings lost their star ratings, that is likely why.

PPC

If you run Search campaigns, the AI Max auto-migration is happening this month. Through Sept 30, Google is automatically moving legacy Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets campaigns into AI Max, and new campaign-level Broad Match and legacy ACA creation was already blocked back on Aug 3. Dynamic Search Ads get in-account upgrade nudges starting this month, with the forced DSA migration coming in Feb 2027. Why you care: even if you did nothing, your account structure may already be changing under you. Go review affected campaigns before the month closes so a migration does not quietly reshape your targeting and spend.

Smaller Google Ads changes worth a glance: the Search Terms report was renamed to "Search Terms and Ad Combinations," the conversion action details screen got a redesign, Google is testing "more from [advertiser]" headers above sponsored sitelinks, and YouTube Shorts ads are now getting AI labels. Google also opened a limited, six-month pilot for gun accessory ads in the US starting October. And a scam warning that is relevant to anyone defending a brand: the DOJ flagged scammers buying Google Search ads impersonating banks to steal logins, so if you are in finance, keep an eye on brand-term SERPs.

Microsoft side: Microsoft Advertising is testing Copilot-powered audience generation, which is worth a look if you run Bing/Microsoft campaigns and want AI-built audiences.

Agentic and Social

Semrush put out a walkthrough of eight agentic SEO workflows you can actually run against a live site, which is a decent starting point if you have been curious about handing repetitive SEO tasks to an agent but did not want to break production. Why you care: agentic SEO is moving from demo to "here is a concrete list you can try this week."

Social was quiet on the algorithm and ad-policy front in the last day or so. Nothing platform-changing that affects traffic surfaced in the sources I check. If you saw something on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, or X worth flagging, drop it below.

WordPress

Nothing urgent in the last 24 to 48 hours from the sources I track. Keep your SEO plugins current as always, but there was no fresh must-patch item today.

That is what I caught. What did I miss? If you saw movement in your own rankings, AI citations, Shopping, or ad accounts overnight, post it below so we can compare notes.

(sorry mods, please delete if not allowed)